


Nightmares

by Clovyre



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Jacques is terrible as always, Past Abuse, Post-Episode: v1e12 Jaundice pt. 2, Weiss needs a hug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:00:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clovyre/pseuds/Clovyre
Summary: Blake can't sleep.Apparently, neither can Weiss.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Weiss Schnee
Comments: 3
Kudos: 59





	Nightmares

Blake couldn’t sleep.

Every time she tried, His face came back in her nightmares. It had been bad when she left, when she was on the run and didn’t know where to go. But as she got things figured out, it started to get better. She got away, half of a continent away, and they went from every night to a couple times a week. She scavenged up enough money to get to Vale, and she couldn’t hear His voice at night anymore. She got into Beacon, where it was safe, and where He couldn’t get to her behind the fortifications of the school and all her real friends, and His face started to fade to a distant memory. Things were good.

So why now? Why, after two and a half months of classes at Beacon, was He back?

The first time they came back, a few weeks ago now, was a Friday. Yang had somehow gotten a better grade than Weiss on a physics test, which was hilarious, and Jaune wasn’t at game night, which was disconcerting, but otherwise, it seemed like a pretty normal day. The next time would have been… the next Tuesday? Or was it Wednesday? There had been a couple times since, but no real causes and nothing in common that Blake could think of.

She opened her eyes with a sigh and a promise to herself to figure it out later. Spring break had started a few days prior, and with Ruby and Yang home for the week, it was just her and Weiss. The faunus in hiding and the unaware heiress, alone in a dark room at three in the morning. A year ago, she would have been ready to kill the Schnee in her sleep. And now Weiss’s presence brought her a layer of comfort, friendship, and safety.

Life is a strange place.

“No… Please… sorry…”

She looked across the room at her teammate and, somehow, friend. Weiss lay on her side, back pressed against the wall in her fitful sleep. If her shaking and mumbling was any indication, Blake wasn’t alone in her nightmares that night. She had seen it often enough on Ilia that she could tell by now when it was better to let her sleep or wake her up; it was safe to say this was the latter.

Slipping silently out of her bed, Blake strode over to her. Now up close, she could see the tears in her eyes, the way her body instinctively cowered at her proximity. This wasn’t just a random nightmare. This was something that, in the Fang, she had only ever seen from people who had lost everything, or nearly died, or had something else in their past too terrible to discuss outside of a fortified and well-defended kingdom.

What the hell happened to you, Weiss?

Blake braced herself. Sometimes, when you woke someone from a nightmare, they could react violently, especially for a fighter. She had found that out the hard way. But she didn’t want Weiss to hurt herself either. Complicated though her thoughts on the heiress may be, at the very least she didn’t deserve to suffer. She put a hand on her leg.

Weiss’s reaction was immediate. All at the same time, her eyes flew open as she sat up and almost screamed, hands flying to draw a rapier that wasn’t there. There was fear in her eyes; real, genuine, do-or-die levels of fear. She pulled her legs away and shrunk into the back corner of the bed before realizing she wasn’t holding her sword, and switched her arms to a boxing position Yang had taught her. A glyph flashed between the two in defense.

“Weiss, it’s okay. It’s just me. It’s Blake. You’re safe.” How odd it was for the former second of Vale’s White Fang to be comforting a Schnee. “Are you okay?”

Weiss shook the sleep fog out of her head, lowered her fists and released the glyph. She pressed her eyes shut tight and filled her lungs before letting out a deep breath. “G-good evening, Blake,” she stammered. “I apologize for my ill conduct.”

Stuffy Weiss. If Blake had learned anything about the heiress in the past few months, it was that while formal might be okay, stuffily formal was always a bad sign. She offered a hand. “That’s not what I asked.”

There was still fear in Weiss’s eyes, but Blake could see it decreasing as she watched the gears turn, trying to rationalize whatever horrors she had seen as the bad dream they were. “I’m— It’s only an unpleasant dream. It’s nothing. I’m fine.” She looked at the blanket over her legs, whether ashamed or just avoiding eye contact Blake wasn’t sure. In either case, it wasn’t nothing.

“Weiss, I’ve never told you about my life before we met, and I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to do that properly. But I had this friend, my roommate in the w— the place I was a year ago.”  _ Smooth, Belladonna, real smooth. _ “She lost both her parents in an, um, accident as a kid. And that was followed by even more trauma that day. I won’t go into more detail there; it’s not my story to tell. But she had these nightmares. Like, two or three times a week. And they were bad. She was having panic attacks in her sleep bad enough to draw ursas. And that was when it was just the two of us in the woods on a, uh, scouting mission.”

With a sharp exhale at the memories, she continued. “And you know what she was like in her sleep? She’d start shaking in terror, muttering and pleading to the monsters in her head. I’ve had recurring nightmares haunt me from my past, and I know how bad they can be. But what I saw from you just now? The crying, and the silent screaming, and the way you reacted when I woke you? That was somehow even worse. So I don’t know what happened, and you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but there’s no way you can be alright after a dream that made you do that.”

Weiss looked up at her, stunned briefly. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but closed it in uncertainty. After another few minutes of thought, she opened it again. “Blake?”

“Mhm?”

“Can you—” As she trailed off, she wiped the tears out of her left eye, the one with a large scar running down through the surrounding flesh.

“It’s okay, take your time.”

Weiss sighed, collecting her thoughts. “Could I have a hug? Please?”

Blake nodded. “Of course.” She shifted over towards the head of the bed, and enveloped the smaller girl in her arms. Here she was, hugging a Schnee to help her feel better after a nightmare. Not just hugging her, but Weiss seemed to almost melt into the embrace, pressing in close to Blake’s torso as she rested her head on the side of her neck. Oh, how the turns have tabled.

“Ruby and Yang really know what’s up, huh?” Weiss joked weakly, choking back a sniffle. Right. Blake had forgotten that she had never had a hug until after initiation. Not from her parents, not from her sister, not from a friend, though Blake had her doubts she had even had any of those. Nothing. 

How fucked up was that?

_ What the hell happened to you, Weiss? _

“Hey, it’s okay, you’re with me. You’re safe. Just let it all out. C’mon, you’ll feel a lot better afterwards.”

Weiss looked up to meet her eyes. “You promise you’re okay with me crying on you?”

Blake held her close, rubbing circles into her back to ground her like she used to do to Ilia. “Of course. I promise. Just let it all out.”

Weiss cried.

Blake sat there with her, holding her tightly but gently, the kind of hug where Weiss knew she could easily get out if she tried, but wouldn’t fall away from Blake’s warm arms if she went limp. She laid the two of them down on the bed so they wouldn’t have to focus on supporting their own weight, cradling Weiss’s head against her chest. She ran her dominant hand through silky white hair, gently massaging her scalp . They lay there for what could have been minutes or hours, silence broken only by Blake’s quiet reassurances and Weiss’s sobs. And as her heartbeat went from a panicked frenzy down to a relaxed resting cadence, and her breathing returned to normal, Weiss nuzzled into the warm body below her. There was no threat here. Nothing was going to hurt her. She was safe.

Blake pulled her hand out of her teammate’s hair and brought it back down to her shoulder. “Weiss?” she whispered. “Are you feeling any better?”

There was no response. Weiss was asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I wrote this because I miss my girlfriend.
> 
> I have no idea when this will be updated because I've never written a fic before and am starting college on Tuesday. But I do plan to finish it; it'll probably be relatively short, but who knows.
> 
> Anyway, how's my pacing? That's a thing that exists, right?


End file.
